In the mid-sixties,
Hanne Darboven’s first construction drawings attracted attention for the
first time. Over the course of years, day by day, a uniquely consistent
work arose out of Darboven’s obsessive involvement with numbers and dates
– thousands of pages on which the artist seeks to transcribe time in a
system of order that wards off the world’s chaos. Angela Rosenberg
on Hanne Darboven and her current installation "Hommage à Picasso."

The master himself
greets us. The bronze Picasso head
has a rather peevish look about it, however. It’s part of the current
expanded version of Hanne
Darboven’s Hommage
à Picasso from the years 1995 to 2006 – an installation and
comissioned work for the Deutsche
Guggenheim which immerses the viewer in a sea of numbers and signs.
The walls are packed from floor to ceiling: 270 custom-made frames contain
nearly 10,000 individual pages on which the artist Hanne Darboven has
transcribed the last decade of the 20th century. Augmented by a framed
copy of the 1955 Picasso painting Woman with Turkish Headdress as
well as a series of purchased and commissioned sculptures, this record of
the turn of the millennium is musically accompanied by Darboven’s newly
produced work Opus 60, a symphony for a 120-piece orchestra.

The exhibition has
turned out to be surprisingly emotional. Visitors lucky enough to
experience the premiere performance of her composition at the Deutsche
Guggenheim, where 120 instrumentalists of the Young
Symphony Berlin played before an international audience on February 3
2006, got to see an extremely happy, visibly moved, and rather
fragile-looking woman profusely thanking the musicians and conductor, a
far cry from the cool, standoffish female dandy she otherwise prefers to
play.

A daughter of a well-known coffee bean dynasty, Darboven was
born in Munich in 1941 and grew up in Hamburg-Harburg, where she lives in
her parents’ house to this day. Originally, she wanted to become a
pianist, yet her passion for art, which already manifested itself in early
childhood, led her to a brief, but intensive period of study at the art
academy in Hamburg, where her search for a universal and fundamental truth
began.

"It is what it is" is what Lawrence
Weiner once said about his colleague’s work. Anyone who takes the time
to look at the exhibition Hommage à Picasso can discover a new
side to this important artist. And whoever expected a caustic showdown or
a reckoning between an icon of conceptual art and the most important
painter of the twentieth century will be disappointed, because the cool,
reserved elegance that otherwise always characterizes her installations is
broken in a refreshing manner here. A group of life-sized wicker donkeys,
an opulent bronze goat, hand-painted ornamental frames: the crafted
objects Darboven has installed alongside her number columns and textual
images are reminiscent of Picasso’s formal language, his love of folklore
and the "primitive." At the same time, they fill the room with what seems
like a mix between an almost touching naivety and a cultish mysticism.
This does not disturb the overwhelming clarity of the wall piece, but
lends it a spiritual and even upbeat form, giving the overall exhibition
the feel of a modern chapel or an Egyptian burial chamber.

This
impression is further underscored by the quiet, repetitive musical
formulas of Opus 60 playing in the background. Darboven’s
installation almost seems like a place of purification: dignified, mild,
concentrated, yet nonetheless laced with a wonderful touch of dry wit,
such as when the artist signs some of the pages on behalf of her own
dearly loved goat: H.D. + Mickey 1995.

Hanne Darboven, 21 x 21 (detail),
1968, Deutsche Bank Collection

Following the catastrophe of German fascism, whose effects
could still be clearly felt in the sixties, when it polarized an entire
generation, the young artist did not seek a connection to the active
political scene, but rather quietude and concentration. In order to escape
the confines of West Germany, she initially went for a short time to
Paris, but then found her second home in, of all places, the chaos of New
York. For three years, she withdrew here to a table in her tiny, 300
square-foot apartment on East 90th Street, where she made her first
constructions with pencil and pen: diagrammatic drawings, charts, diagonal
lines running at various angles. The artist transcribed numerical
regularities onto American graph paper because these were "so enduring,
limited, and artificial."